Category Archives: Privacy

Wuhan Virus Tracking

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Many nations are using cell phone data and/or apps installed on cell phones to track folks known to be infected in order to identify those persons’ contacts and to build up anticipatory data of pending and developing hotspots. This is intended to facilitate more efficient targeting of medical resources, to more efficiently target more limited populations, and so to more quickly free up economic resources and activity.

The US Federal government, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is creating a portal that will compile phone geolocation data to help authorities predict where outbreaks could next occur and determine where resources are needed, though the effort faces privacy concerns.
… Alphabet Inc’s Google said Thursday it would share a portion of its huge trove of data on people’s movements.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an app to track Covid-19 patients and the people they interact with, and are in talks with the federal government about its use, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The EU is going even further, developing and propagating apps that track individuals, ostensibly with their permission.

These moves are being sold as necessary for the present situation, even though they badly risk individual privacy—cue Ben Franklin.

Such sales pitches would be believable—and stipulate arguendo that the tradeoff might be minimally acceptable—if these surveillance moves had sunset clauses in them. Such surveillances need to be automatically terminated after some specified period of time or at some easily measurable milestone—Wuhan Virus infection rate drops below a particular threshold, for instance. Sunset clauses also must include destruction of the surveillance databases, with that being verifiable by anyone who asks—the present FOIA procedures would provide an example of how that would work.

Unfortunately, sunset clauses are notably absent from these moves toward government surveillance of us citizens—the danger of which is emphasized by the example of the People’s Republic of China and by our own FBI’s abuse of its surveillance authorities, along with our own FISA Court judges’ cynical acceptance of those abuses.

Where Were the FISA Court Judges?

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DoJ’s Inspector General is finding yet more, yet more rampant, miscreancies in and done by what used to be our nation’s—the world’s, even—premier law enforcement agency.

DOJ’s new assessment indicated that FISA problems were systemic at the bureau and extended beyond the Page probe. In four of the 29 cases the DOJ inspector general reviewed, the FBI did not have any so-called “Woods files” at all, referring to documentation demonstrating that it had independently corroborated key facts in its surveillance warrant applications. In three of those applications, the FBI couldn’t confirm that Woods documentation ever existed.
The other 25 applications contained an average of 20 assertions not properly supported with Woods materials; one application contained 65 unsupported claims. The review encompassed the work of eight field offices over the past five years in several cases.

The IG went on.

“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the DOJ IG wrote in a memo today [31 Mar] to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

That’s damning enough, but the problem is much wider than just a failed FBI.  The judges sitting on this Star Chamber FISA court knew those materials needed to be present, yet they approved the warrants in all of those flawed, to the point of dishonesty, warrant applications. Every single one of them.

This is another demonstration that this secret court cannot be fixed; it must be eliminated.

Full stop.

Privacy

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Here is why more needs to be done to protect our privacy—primarily by us, but with Government’s assistance. Below is an example, quoted from a bulletin board I follow. The author is talking about an investment during a time of coronavirus disruption of supply chains, but the subtext should be obvious.

re: GOOG
They don’t build physical widgets in Wuhan that might get hard to obtain…the ad biz will probably keep on rolling.
We just bought 2 new Android smartphones and 1 new Android tablet. Coming from a dumb-phone flip phone and a Kindle.
Google [Alphabet, which owns Google] OWNS that market. You cannot even download/install an app without having a google account. And every time you do something, Google prompts you to set up a payment method. No way to say “Hell no, never.” The choices are: google play card, credit card, debit card, and “skip for now, maybe later”.
So, clever me, I created a dummy google/gmail account. And logged in so I could install some free apps from Google Play. Fine.
But within 2 days it somehow associated my wife’s gmail account with the Android tablet. And she has NEVER touched that tablet. Now every time I go to use it, it asks me which account I want to log into—the dummy account or her account.
Google OWNS that market.
—————
Near as I can figure out, her name is on our Amazon Prime account. And our Sony Bluray player and our Roku smart TV are both registered to Amazon Prime Video—so obviously in her name.
Now, we do not get cell phone coverage at our house, so all our external internet network access goes through our internet ISP. And the way that works is that, to the internet, every device in our house has the same IP address.
So something managed to figure out that her gmail account was associated with our external IP address, and also that same IP address was associated with the Amazon Prime Video account, and that her gmail account is accociated with that Amazon account. Therefore every device in our house that contacts the external internet has some sort of connection to her gmail address.
At home, the Android smartphones and the tablet can only access the internet via our internal network, on WIFI, since we get no cell coverage. So if somebody puts all these pieces together it is easy to figure out the connections.
Google managed to figure it all out. Took them 2 days.

Heads up.

“Should Government Halt the Use of Facial-Recognition Technology?”

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The Wall Street Journal ran one of its point-counterpoint debates over the weekend; this one treating the topic in this post’s title.

The debaters focused on the error rate of the technology and whether that was a big deal or a little one; although there was passing mention of civil liberty problems.

I say the question is over-broad.

Government should not only halt its own use of facial recognition software; it should be statutorily barred from it. We haven’t, yet, been overrun by the People’s Republic of China. The civil liberty—the individual liberty—matter is much too serious to be glossed over, and this is one venue where the line is better drawn at zero rather than trusting Government (which is to say, the men of Government) to go this far but no farther.

The question of its commercial use is a separate one from Government’s use or not use. This question should have a market answer, arrived at by customers and the businesses with which we interact.

In Which Illinois Got It Right

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Back in 2008, Illinois passed a law barring companies from collecting customers’ personal biometric information without their prior permission. Companies in Illinois also were required to develop a policy, and make it readily available, that laid out how those biometric data would be stored and when they would be destroyed.

Facebook was accused of violating that law when it decided to use its facial recognition technology to analyze users’ photos in order to create and store “face templates.” Users’ faces are plainly biometric data in this context, the data were taken by Facebook without the owners’/users’ permission, and in 2015, folks sued Facebook over its misbehavior.

Now comes a reckoning of sorts.

Facebook has agreed to settle a $550 million lawsuit brought on behalf of millions of Illinois users who claim the social network’s automated tagging feature powered by facial recognition technology violates their biometric privacy rights.

Good law, and mostly good outcome.

But maybe the class action group shouldn’t have settled. Settlements only bind the parties to the suit and are only as good as the promises of those parties. Facebook has a long history of finding ways to weasel-word around the terms of its settlements, violating their spirit if not their letter.  Court judgments, though, are permanent, binding on all parties to the suit, and binding also on everyone else within the court’s jurisdiction.

We’ll see on this one, but Illinois got this one right with its law.